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Framing Inequalities of Gender, Class and Caste

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Framing Inequalities of Gender, Class and Caste Intersectional Grievances in Care Work: Framing inequalities of gender, class and caste By: Preethi Krishnan Abstract How do social movements include or exclude intersectional grievances of individual participants? What do variations in framing within the movement tell us about including intersectional grievances? I address these questions by examining frames deployed by anganwadi (childcare) workers in India and their organized union’s documented demands. I utilize a systemic inter-sectional approach to examine two specific grievances-—low wages and weakening of public provision of care—that lie at the intersection of gender, caste, class, and care work. Workers use intersectional frames to interpret grievances, as they experience intersectional inequalities of gender, caste, and class. Findings show that the union targets the state alone while workers target both state and society. As intersectional grievances are durable inequalities that traverse across the boundaries of state and society, social movement frames may need a broader prognosis that targets both state and society to include intersectional grievances. Krishnan, P. (2020). Intersectional Grievances in Care Work: Framing inequalities of gender, class and caste. Mobilization: An International Quarterly, 25(4), 493-512. https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-22-4-493 Publisher version of record available at: https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-22-4-493. Archived version from NC DOCKS available at: http://libres.uncg.edu/ir/wcu/listing.aspx?styp=ti&id=35438. INTERSECTIONAL GRIEVANCES IN CARE WORK: FRAMING INEQUALITIES OF GENDER, CLASS AND CASTE* Preethi Krishnan† How do social movements include or exclude intersectional grievances of individual participants? What do variations in framing within the movement tell us about including intersectional grievances? I address these questions by examining frames deployed by anganwadi (childcare) workers in India and their organized union’s documented demands. I utilize a systemic inter- sectional approach to examine two specific grievances—low wages and weakening of public provision of care—that lie at the intersection of gender, caste, class, and care work. Workers use intersectional frames to interpret grievances, as they experience intersectional inequalities of gender, caste, and class. Findings show that the union targets the state alone while workers target both state and society. As intersectional grievances are durable inequalities that traverse across the boundaries of state and society, social movement frames may need a broader prognosis that targets both state and society to include intersectional grievances. Why and how social movements emerge when they do have been of central interest to social movement scholars. While earlier scholarship explained movement emergence as psychological discontent and “strain” in response to grievances (Smelser 1962), others argued that movement emergence varied even when grievances were constant (McAdam 1999). Since then, various frameworks have been used to explain social movement emergence—political opportunity struc- ture and threats, resource mobilization, and the framing process (Benford and Snow 2000; McAdam 1999; McCarthy and Zald 1977). These seminal articles that focused on mobilizing and organizing often rendered grievances as irrelevant. Interestingly, in recent years, there has been more attention paid to the structure of grievances as critical to explaining movement emergence (Hechter, Pfaff, and Underwood 2016; McKane and McCammon 2018; Simmons 2014; Skotnicki 2019). Others have shown how framing and meaning making of grievances mattered (Danaher and Crawshaw 2019; Ferree 2003; Roy 2010). Grievances also provide key insights into our understanding of inequality, including intersectional inequality. The increasing focus on inter- sectionality in recent social movement scholarship (Fisher, Dow, and Ray 2017; Hurwitz 2019; Terriquez, Brenes, and Lopez 2018) is testimony to the need for merging insights from social movements and inequality, elevating our understanding of both. Examining grievances, par- ticularly intersectional grievances, is critical to that attempt. Paying attention to intersectional grievances and examining their inclusion and exclusion in official social movement documents may have implications for addressing inequality and for mobilizing support. This article makes two main claims. One, examining variations in frames, “the interpretive schemata” used by individuals and the movement organization (official documents), may provide insights into understanding how intersectional grievances are excluded and included in social movements (Goffman 1974; Snow and Benford 1992). Two, as inter- sectional grievances are durable inequalities that traverse across the boundaries of state and society (Tilly 1998), social movement frames may need a broader prognosis that targets both state and society to include those grievances. Indeed, it would be naive to assume that all stakeholders * Please direct all correspondence to Preethi Krishnan, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, McKee G8A, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC 28723 or email [email protected]. This research was supported by a fellowship from the Purdue Research Foundation. † I thank the anonymous reviewers of Mobilization whose comments helped improve this article significantly. Thanks to the many anganwadi workers, mothers, union leaders, and officers who shared their time, life, and space with me. © 2020 Mobilization: An International Quarterly 25(4):493-512 DOI 10.17813/1086-671X-22-4-493 494 Mobilization in a movement utilize a singular static frame (Oliver and Johnston 2000; Gamson 2004; Ferree 2003). Yet, for a collective adoption of a frame that motivates action, “it must be shared by potential challengers in a public way” (Gamson 1992: 73). Collective action frames emphasize or redefine grievances to hold an external entity accountable and to motivate people to demand change from those entities (Benford 1993b; Snow and Benford 1992). To examine whether movements are inclusive of intersectional grievances, it may be useful to evaluate if and how collective action frames in official movement documents are representative of how people experience and interpret grievances. Drawing on the literature on framing, intersectionality, and grievances, this article addresses the following questions: How do social movement frames include or exclude intersectional grievances experienced by individual participants? How does the variation in framing within the movement influence how intersectional grievances are included or excluded in the movement? I address these questions by analyzing the grievances of unionized anganwadi (childcare) workers in Tamil Nadu, India. Anganwadis are neighborhood childcare centers operating as part of the massive state program for childcare services run by the Indian government known as the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS). In Tamil Nadu, other than for the executive director position, the ICDS system is entirely managed by women (Rajivan 2006). More than 54,000 anganwadis in Tamil Nadu provide food, care, and supplementary nutrition to children under six and their mothers. I draw on five months of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with fifty anganwadi workers, mothers, union leaders, and state representatives, and union documents to show how frames vary within the movement across the documented charter of demands of the union, the union leaders, and individual childcare workers. In particular, I examine two specific grievances—low wages and weakening of public provision of care—grievances that lie at the intersection of gender, caste, class, and care work. Examining how individual workers differ from and mirror the union frames demonstrate how movements include and exclude intersectional grievances. In claiming higher wages from the state, individual anganwadi workers and union leaders referred to the gendered phenomena of unwaged work and unequal wages when comparing their job (one which hires women exclu- sively) to other government jobs that included men. The union charter of demands seldom mentioned gender or caste. But, individual workers acknowledged that the union addressed their grievances related to wages, irrespective of the framing. However, individual workers did not report the same about their grievances related to weakening of public provision of care, a grievance that intersects with the caste structure. Individual workers identify how caste-based segregation is exacerbated by privatization, affecting the number of children coming to the anganwadi. The difference lies in the prognosis aspect of the frame: who was considered responsible for mitigating the grievance. In the case of low wages, irrespective of framing, both individual workers and the union interpreted it as a state problem, a grievance that can be mitigated by the state providing higher wages. However, in the case of weakening of public provision of care, there was a mismatch. Individual workers framed weakening of public provision of care as a societal problem where privatization intersects with the caste structure. To mitigate the grievance, for individual workers, members of society had to stop segregating their children into private schools based on caste. In the union charter of demands, privatization was framed only as a state problem and did not call for societal change. These findings highlight the challenges and possibilities of including
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